DemDev/CP Lecture Series

Karen Jusko is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, and a faculty affiliate of Stanford's Europe Center and the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality.

Jusko's research is motivated by questions about the origins of political inequality in the U.S., in Canada, and in Europe. Her new book, Who Speaks for the Poor? (2017, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), is about which groups – whose interests – are represented by political parties. It develops a general theoretical argument about how changes in electoral geography, or the way in which groups are distributed across electoral districts, create incentives for political entrepreneurs to form new parties. Especially when newly pivotal groups have been excluded from local partisan networks, political entrepreneurs will craft party platforms that represent the interests of these groups. What matters, then, for the political representation of a particular group in society is whether it has been favored by changes in electoral geography.

This research builds on Jusko's dissertation, which was awarded the Harold D. Laswell Prize for the best dissertation in the field of public policy by the Policy Studies Organization and the APSA Public Policy Organized Section.

Jusko received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has been a National Hoover fellow, and a fellow at the Center for the Study Democratic Politics, at Princeton University. Jusko's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, as part of a European Science Foundation Collaborative Research Program, and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford